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Saturday, September 22, 2012

Women At Risk Of Being Disenfranchised

Women add to the list of voters who are potential casualties of
disenfranchisement from restrictive voting laws, as reports show that
women have an increasingly difficult path to obtaining proper photo ID.

Discrepancies over a voter's legal name and the name displayed on their photo ID could stand in the way of their ability to cast a ballot in states that
have enacted strict photo ID laws. That means if a woman's name or
address has changed due to marriage or divorce and her photo ID does not
reflect the change, she could be turned away at the polls.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as 34% of voting-age women—who have proof of citizenship—do not have documents with their current legal name.

* In this example a voter who recently changed her name by reason of
marriage presents a valid Pennsylvania driver's license or Pennsylvania
ID card accompanied by a PennDOT update card, which is sufficient to satisfy the requirements of the Voter ID law regarding proof of identification.

"You need not one, but two forms of ID if you are a
[woman]—there is officially a tax on being a woman in Pennsylvania if
you want to vote," Harris-Perry said.

Ari Berman, who has covered voter ID laws extensively for The Nation magazine,
added that Pennsylvania voters would also be subject to the individual
discretion of workers at over 9,000 different polling places. "We're talking about, at the very least, a lot of chaos on election day," he said.

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Spiegel

9/11 "Day of Destruction, Decade of War"

The two-hour 9/11 "Day of Destruction, Decade of War" documentary by Rachel Maddow and her NBC colleague Richard Engel is found in at MSNBC's documentary designated page. "We both felt like there was explanatory work to be done," Maddow said. "We are structurally different than we were." That, she said, is really the special's overarching thesis: that the country has changed.